Rare dev found a N64 flaw that almost delayed it even more

Posted 18 Apr 2016

The former head of software at Rareware, Martin Hollis, released an anecdote about the early days of the Nintendo 64, regarding a flaw or unexpected limitation of the Nintendo 64:

I wrote a piece of code which displayed spinning icosahedrons; as many as possible until the framerate dropped below 60Hz. The head of the project at SGI was not too pleased to discover what the performance of the machine was in terms of triangles per second. He asked to see my code in the hope it was inefficient. It wasn’t. He later told me that SGI very nearly did another spin of the hardware to fix the issue, which was with the memory interface. I don’t know exact figures but a second spin of the hardware (equivalent to a second edition of a book) is sometimes said to cost a million dollars, and there is the additional cost of a delay in reaching the market which might be enormously larger.

Now, this quote talks about an event that happened that almost made the Nintendo 64 have another delay. When Martin Hollis ran this stress test/benchmark program on the Nintendo 64, SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) might have done a completely new iteration of the Nintendo 64’s Reality Coprocessor which would have been a lot more impressive and powerful.

Who knows what Nintendo 64 games would look like if this flaw had been picked out earlier, before production went all-out? Maybe there would be greater draw distances or more detailed models. Either way, it would have further widened the gap between the power of the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation.

Rare dev found a N64 flaw that almost delayed it even more

The former head of software at Rareware, Martin Hollis, released an anecdote about ta Nintendo 64 flaw, regarding a limitation of the N64's hardware.